At first blush, Stephen Norrington's (Blade) is the kind of hip nouveau Trainspotting, about a hot young actor who quickly washes out and becomes another sad victim of the UK underworld.

Starring Max Beesley (known almost exclusively for being Mariah Carey's co-star in Glitter) as our ennuied beefcake, Norrington paints a portrait of time running out and life slipping away. Beesley's Billy Byrne jumps from encounters with electronica fetish clubs to jazz-standard-lip-synching hit men, ending up in the arms with one of the least enchanting ingenue I've seen in a long while. Played by Emily Corrie, it's not really her fault -- the lovely lass is stuck under a knit cap that makes her look like a common street urchin.

After enduring Mariah Carey's film debut, Glitter, I'm reminded of a bit from Chris Rock's Bigger and Blacker. In response to women saying that they can raise a child without a man, Rock says, "You can drive a car with your feet, but that don't mean it should be done." To that I say, you can give Mariah Carey a movie, but that certainly don't mean it should be done.

Sure, there are plenty of pop star film vehicles out there -- from The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night to the Spice Girls' Spice World -- but none have been so vapidly pointless or laughable as Glitter. Everything about this complete tripe is ludicrous.

Just about scrapes bottom, if for no other reason than the obnoxious camerawork and editing which has every scene re-enacted rapid-fire multiple times from multiple angles, usually with pulsing music over the whole thing. The story is wholesale idiotic, too: bank robber takes suicidal bank clerk hostage; she demands her death, he refuses. Oh, the hilarity! Anyway, Mr. Lustig, this isn't a music video, pal. Get it together.

I like Mike Figgis a lot... as a person, I mean. Frankly, I haven't been able to make any sense of his movies since Leaving Las Vegas, and Hotel is probably his least accessible work ever.

The story -- as it exists -- concerns a troupe of British actors who descend on Venice to shoot a film version of the play The Duchess of Malfi. We follow the production with Figgis's all-seeing camera (courtesy of a documentarian following the production) -- which has a tendency to dip into slow-motion, cut the sound out, and shoot using an ultraviolet filter in the dark -- and bear witness to all manner of strange goings-on, the description of which I can't even begin to fathom putting on paper.

The rise to fame of Billie Frank -- the struggling songstress played by ear-piercing pop diva Mariah Carey in the witless showbiz fairytale "Glitter" -- is so absurdly easy you'd think you're supposed to hate her for it.

After a quickie boo-hoo introduction in which young Billie is abandoned by her bar-singer ghetto mom for no adequately explored reason and put in an orphanage, director Vondie Curtis Hall ("Gridlock'd") fast-forwards to a nightclub scene in 1983 (symbolized by the occasional butt-ugly costume). There our girl, now all grown up curvy, gets offered a gig as a backup singer to a tone-deaf rising star, solely based on the way she wiggles her booty.

During the ensuing recording session, the pimp-daddy producer (Terrence Howard, "Angel Eyes") turns up Billie's microphone and substitutes her voice for his star's. In the next scene an influential DJ called "Dice" (some scruffy-handsome English actor named Max Beesley spouting the most laughable white-boy street lingo ever spoken with a straight face) hears the tape, hears Billie sing, realizes who the real talent is and offers to make her famous.